Not With A Bang
by phirephox666
Summary: There is no great last battle, no final confrontation between The Good Guy and The Bad Guy. Harry hardly resembles a good guy anymore, filled with hatred and darkness and sorrow. And The Bad Guy? The Bad Guy is every nihil still alive on this putrid rock.


**Title:** Not With A Bang

**Author: **PhirePhox666

**Fandom:** Harry Potter

**Pairing/Characters:** Harry, Voldemort, Percy, Neville, Bill, Luna, Astoria Greengrass.

**Rating: **M

**Warnings:** Rather Dark. Lotsa Character Death. Lotsa death in general. Destruction. No Happy Ending. Vague implications of Het and Slash.

**Summary:** There is no great last battle, no final confrontation between The Good Guy and The Bad Guy. Harry hardly resembles a good guy anymore, filled with hatred and darkness and sorrow. And The Bad Guy? The Bad Guy is every nihil still alive on this putrid rock.

**Disclaimer: **Ah, yes, I do indeed own this. Or, you know, not.

**Word Count:** 1,611

**Dedication: **For Aslan.

**Prompt: **None.

**Excerpt:** None.

**A/N:** Uh... Yeah, not really sure what happened with this one. Was on vacation and couldn't get the quote below out of my head. It went from there. Right now this is a oneshot but I might make it a chaptered fic later on. Is dark tho', very much so in fact. Reviews and Flames are welcome. Hope you enjoy. Nihil means nothing in Latin, by the by.

Not With A Bang

_"This is the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper." -T.S. Elliot_

There was no great, last battle that either won or lost them The Second War of the Wizarding World. The Massacre of Hogwarts had quickly lived up to it's name, no one bothered to call it a battle. The causalities had been massive due to Inferi.

Death had collected many that day and not even Harry's sacrifice could keep them from death for very long. Few of them survived and after The Massacre there were no great amassing of strength on the side of good. Seeing as most of their forces had been obliterated in the halls and on the fields of Hogwarts such an amassing was nigh impossible.

Thus begun the tag team raids. Raids of two or three wizards or witches whose goal was to get supplies off of and kill Death Eaters. Harry, unwilling leader by general consensus of the few "good" wizards left, lost three wizards in the first two weeks of raids to offensive wards.

Then he found Bill Weasley, trapped in the home of Goyle Senior, and rescued him (for even the leader was not allowed to just sit about all day. The last of the Weasleys alive besides Percy and one of the few still alive that had fought beside Harry at Hogwarts. They learned how to detect and disable wards quickly out of necessity.

Their numbers eventually stabilized to about a dozen. They lost more than they gained although as Voldemort became more and more infuriated and aggressive those who'd chosen neutral or tried to stay out of the war were forced to chose sides. Of those who'd fought beside him at Hogwarts there were only three left after the first year. Bill and Neville had both fallen on the same raid, taking down a dozen death eaters between them in the process.

Nymphadora Tonks had thrown herself in to her missions with such reckless abandon it could have been called willing suicide. She was the only partner-less one of Harry's forces, only allowed to be such because of her danger to others at her unconcern for her life.

Person after person, wizard and witch alike, died at the hands of the enemy. Died underneath his command as he tried to win this war. Now he could only feel numb to their deaths, quickly losing sight of his purpose.

The second year was worse. The muggle, who'd lain forgotten in the face of the war that had torn the wizarding world apart, made their presence known in the most destructive manner they could think of. The destruction wrought on their world, the destruction that the war had torn through most of Europe had alerted the muggles to their magical counterparts. And the muggles were scared and in their fear they were rabid dogs.

Death took more victims in the first month of the second year than in the entirety of the first as a war roared to life between the wizards, the magicals, and the muggles. Luna, one of his last three, died in a raid gone bad that took out half of Voldemort's forces, three-quarters of the ministry and five of Harry's people by muggle bombing. Percy finally went down when muggles found one of Harry's caches and lay in wait for someone to visit it. Harry lost four others that day.

The muggles were determined to exterminate every magical person, man, woman and child. They saw what could be accomplished with magic and feared it and were ready to destroy the threat they saw.

Nearly three-quarters of Voldemort's forces fell to muggle weapons that second year. Both his forces and Harry's had swelled with recruits from the normal wizarding world. There was no Ministry, no villages, only chaos and pain and trying to destroy them before they destroyed you. Nearly one half of the magical world, innocent children and all, had fallen to guns and grenades and bombs.

To Harry's group, whom had become focused on raiding muggles now instead of Voldemort, they had become Nihils. Nothings.

In the third year of war and destruction the war exploded across the globe when the rest of the nations learned of the "threat" that magicals posed, so easily convinced to hunt down and commit genocide on a people. Muggles across the world screamed for the deaths of all those magical. Parents drowned their children if they showed hints of magical powers and chaos reigned.

There was no good or evil. Harry's dwindling forces joined with Voldemort's dwindling forces. Voldemort, who'd been forced in to some semblance of sanity mostly by accident, understood as well as Harry that they could not afford to make any distinctions between them. The Wizarding World would die if they could not unite themselves. They would die.

They fall into battle, leading their people to kill more muggles, nihils as they almost all now call them, than either of them had managed before. They are vicious in their faint victory and there is no distinction between light and dark magic. No hesitation to send an Avada Kedavra at a nihil. No hesitation in grabbing a nihil bomb or grenade and lobbing it right back at them.

Deaths sky-rocketed even as worse weapons came in to play. Weapons that began to destroy the Earth and the nihils even as it destroyed magicals.

In the seventh year Voldemort dies, greeting death for his last time as a nihil puts six bullets in his chest point blank. There are no horcruxes left, war with Harry's side and then the resulting war with the nihils having prevented him from the creation of more since Harry elimination of the last of the original seven. So he dies, taking with him at least two dozen nihils in the explosion that gets him caught and leaving Harry with a group of thirteen magicals in a world that is dying.

Dying because of nihil weapons that poison the Earth. Poison the earth, the air, the water and kill both magical and nihil and animals and trees alike. The nihil are blind to the fact that their Earth, their home, is dying. But the magicals, Harry, feel it.

In the fifteenth year, fourteen after the start of this slaughter between the magicals and nihils, only Harry and Astoria Greengrass live. If you could call what they do living. They run, they hid, they hunt food and nihils alike, and in turn are hunted. Living in a dying forest that is poisoned more every day as the world around them becomes more obviously sick even to those who are blinding themselves to it.

Harry can feel his magic fighting against the poisons that surround him. They kill him slowly, working at his defenses, wearing them down more day by day. He gives himself maybe three more years of this life. Astoria has even less.

And the muggles are dying even faster, killed by their own destruction and revenge. Doing more damage than magicals ever had and unwilling to stop and even if they were willing it's too late now. The world is far past the point of healing.

When Astoria dies in that fifteenth year it is a slow, agonizing death and Harry find so little regret in himself. He's seen an entire people die around him, hears the cry of the Earth as it screams for mercy and wails in pain as it dies. He is the only one of his people alive now and he can not find sorrow for Astoria in himself in the face of the sorrow that has consumed him for every other person taken from him and the hate at those who'd destroyed the world.

He's dying, but he runs and he fights and he hides and he kills and he takes his own revenge in the face of the death of the world.

In the nineteenth year, a year more than he thought he'd live, he still fights. Kept alive by pure luck some times and pure stubbornness other times. Maybe death would be a release, certainly it would be the easy way out, perhaps even welcome if it happened. But he's never been one to take the easy road.

He's long since lost track of how many he has killed. Doesn't care how many nihils he's killed either. As long as he can get as many of them to hell as possible he doesn't care. This is no longer about saving magicals, there is no one left to save. It's about destroying those who sought to destroy his people.

He hates the nihils far more than he ever hated Voldemort. He has been reduced to nothing more than an animal, surviving and running. Sometimes surviving only on three-day-old rodents and poisoned water. Developing a cough that hinders him. Never staying in one place in dead forests and cracked land.

There is no great last battle, no final confrontation between The Good Guy and The Bad Guy. Harry hardly resembles a good guy anymore, filled with hatred and darkness and sorrow. And The Bad Guy? The Bad Guy is every nihil still alive on this putrid rock. And although they are now dying in droves they far outnumber him.

There is no last battle. Harry dies instead trapped in a wrecked cottage, one in which he had been staying when the roof had fallen in. Found by nihils only three days later and shot point blank in the chest. Dying as Voldemort and so many others had died. He dies slowly in pain and full of hatred. He dies listening to the fading wails of the near dead Earth. He dies master of the Deathly Hallows.

He dies Master of Death.

_Finis.  
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